Description:

Explore how mindfulness can be incorporated into management practice and organisations and identify ways that it can enhance business and management education.

The aim of this lab is to create a platform for open exchange and collaboration among EURAM conference participants, including academics, business leaders, institutional representatives and students on the topic of mindfulness as a key practice related to the conference theme of ‘navigating the high waters of disruptive changes’ taking place within organizational contexts and the wider environment.

In this lab, we will explore how mindfulness can be incorporated into management practice and organisations and identify ways that it can enhance business and management education.  The Lab will draw on historical and contemporary perspectives of mindfulness, examining both spiritual and secular teachings and practice, building on the research and teaching practices of the proponents. Participants will be able to identify ways in which mindfulness techniques and principles can form part of a holistic approach to management and management education.

Supporting literature

Mindfulness is a key Buddhist principle involving the cultivation of an intentional awareness of the present moment and quieting of the mind through techniques such as focused breathing and meditation.  While both spiritual and more secular varieties of mindfulness and meditation have experienced periods of popularity in the West over the past century, the practice of mindfulness has become seen as a valuable approach in healthcare for managing physical pain (e.g., Kabat-Zinn, 2003; Cusens et al., 2010); supporting psychological wellbeing (e.g., Brown et al., 2025) and reducing stress (e.g., Sharma and Rush, 2014).

More recently, research has examined the effects of mindfulness techniques such as meditation, reflecting on gratitude, body scanning and focused breathing within management and organisational contexts. For example, Urrila & Mäkelä’s (2024) study of the experiences of leaders who had undertaken an 8-week mindfulness course in Finland found it helped them to improve their social awareness and thereby increase their leadership capabilities across cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions. Similarly, leaders practising mindfulness report an improved capacity for perspective-taking and adaptive thinking, enabling them to maintain focus on long-term goals without neglecting relational or strategic considerations (Doornich and Lynch, 2024).

Mindfulness is part of a variety of spiritual practices linked to practical wisdom (Rocha et al., 2024), spiritual discernment and virtue ethics (Nandram et al., 2025), as well as a broader ‘organisational spirituality’ (Rocha and Pinheiro, 2020). These practices also incorporate values shared by both secular and religious traditions to promote social good within the organisation and its practices.

Practising mindfulness can stimulate prosocial behaviours, not only building an awareness of the present but also developing empathy and ‘mental capital’, which supports well-being (Hafenbrack et al., 2020; Levey and Levey, 2019). By boosting these cognitive and emotional resources, mindfulness can develop resilience in the face of stress, and a flexibility and adaptability of mind to respond to a fast-changing, complex and protean workplace (Baron et al., 2018). For this reason, the introduction of mindfulness within management curricula can provide students with crucial skills to support problem-solving and reflexive practice (Randerson and Pillai, 2020). Such reflexivity practised at both individual and organisational levels – including higher education contexts – can help to ‘balance the societal and intersubjective expectations that we both embody and are embedded in’ (Daly and Larsen, 2025).

Drawing on the literature and our own research and practice, we will facilitate a lab workshop with participants that offers both practical skill-building activities in mindfulness (e.g., body scanning, breathwork and meditative practice) as well as resources and guidance in integrating mindfulness into management education and broader organisational contexts, such as Vago and Silbersweig’s S-ART framework (2012) and Huppert’s (2017 in Tan, 2021) ‘three A’s’ that focus on awareness, attention and attitude.

The lab is organized by:

• Dr. Peter Daly, Professor of Management, EDHEC Business School, Roubaix, France.
• Dr Raysa Rocha, Lecturer in Organisation Studies and HRM, Essex Business School, Essex, UK.
• Dr Kristen Reid, Senior Lecturer in Work-Based Learning, The Open University Business School, Milton Keynes, UK.

Program:

13:00   Introduction

13:10  Centering

13:15  Presentation

13:25  Mindful Activities

13:55  Open Debate

14:15  Closing

14:30   End of program and some coffee